Our aim is to help students have a greater positive impact with their careers.

We believe that a key bottleneck to solving the world's most important problems is talent – so we're trying to address this by supporting University of Bristol students to work on them.

We run an effective altruism reading group, provide 1-1 support, and connect students to job opportunities and career advice resources to help them tackle the world's most pressing issues more effectively.

 

Bookings are open for 1-1 meetings!

Book here

 

Our values

Effective Altruism Bristol is for people who:

• Want to help others

• Try to help more rather than less

• Value all people equally

• Are open to changing their view

• Act with honesty and integrity

These values may seem obvious, but we believe that they have significant implications for how we should be thinking about altruism. In order to help more rather than less, we should try to work out what way of helping is the most effective, given our limited resources. And as we value all people equally, we shouldn’t be partial to members of a particular country or people suffering from a particular problem.

Instead, we should consider all the possible cause areas, and all the possible ways we could help people (or any sentient being), and we should choose the ones where we’ll have the most impact. Otherwise, we’d be accidentally giving preferential treatment to some group of individuals, or we’d be letting some individuals suffer at no additional cost to us.

This analysis is really important because some programmes are 100 times or even 1,000 times as helpful as others, for the same cost. For example, if you are trying to tackle blindness and you have a budget of $40,000, you could either use your entire budget to train a single guide dog to help a blind person in the US, or you could fund more than 2,000 blindness-curing surgeries in Africa, which cost less than $20 per person.

You can read more about effective altruism and its values on effectivealtruism.org.

 

What we do

Our ultimate goal is to help sentient beings as much as we can. We tentatively believe that the best way to do this at EA Bristol is to introduce students to effective altruism and support those who agree with it to use their careers to work on our focus areas.

We provide:

• Advice on how to have the most impact with your career (this is based on the advice on 80000hours.org – we also recommend speaking to one of their advisors as they have a lot more expertise than us!)

• Notification of graduate jobs, internships and other opportunities in effective altruism and our focus areas

• An introductory reading group where we meet up once a week to discuss topics in effective altruism

• An in-depth group where we discuss global issues and other EA-related topics in more detail and we plan and build skills for our career

We also run 1-1 meetings with our organising team as it’s a quick and effective way to support our members and get feedback on how we can run the society better. In these meetings we can answer questions about effective altruism, let you know about career resources and job opportunities and connect you to professionals in your area of interest.

Finally, we occasionally host external speakers, we organise trips to effective altruism conferences and other external events and we of course have regular socials so our members can get to know each other!

 

Our focus areas

As we explain above, we believe that we should prioritise between different cause areas in order to have more impact. To do this, we use the SNT framework – we estimate the scale, neglectedness and tractability of each problem, and we prioritise the ones which score highly overall. In other words, we focus on problems which cause a lot of suffering (in expectation), which few other organisations are working on and which seem relatively feasible to solve.

There are a wide range of views within effective altruism on the question of which causes we should be working on, however some common focus areas are:

• Potential risks from AI

• Catastrophic pandemics

• Global health

• Factory farming

Other focus areas include: nuclear weapons, climate change, great power war, mental health, global aid policy, global priorities research and improving institutional decision-making.

To be clear, it's not that we don't think other causes are important – rather that there are so many important problems and the effective altruism community obviously can't solve all of them, so we should focus on the problems where we can make the most difference.

 

Get involved

Book a 1-1 meeting with us

A 1-1 meeting can be a great way to get up to speed with what we do in our society. They are one of the main ways that we help students have a greater positive impact with their career. Anyone can book a 1-1 meeting with us – you do not need to be a member and you do not need to have attended any of our events. Unless specified otherwise, each meeting is 30 minutes and no preparation is necessary.

Book here
 

Stay in touch

Sign up to our mailing list here – this is the best way to keep up-to-date (if you check your email!)

To contact us, email hello@eabristol.org or DM us on our Instagram.